SEO

Web Development

Being an internet marketer, you probably can make a good use of information about your competitors. There are some “free” resources that you may consider while gathering this information. One of them is Compete.com. Let’s look what they are offering for free.

It seems to me that the most valuable portion of this free report is traffic report and traffic comparison for up to 5 sites. It shows amount of visitors, visitor engagement (including time of visit and attention) and growth trends.

Paid versions are offering more detailed information and much more data. And as usual, free version is bait for purchasing PRO version. Price for Pro version is not very attractive. I don’t belive that many marketers would purchase this information for $199/mounth. And this is why- not good enough level of confidence. While Compete.com claims that they are using more than 2 million of US internet users to collect this data, they may not be the right users. Majority of this data comes from Compete.com toolbar. But who will visit their site and install Compete.com toolbar? Most of their visitors are internet marketers and SEO experts and, may be, web developers. Do you think that internet marketers would properly represent the whole internet user population? Probably not.

Just one simple example to prove this point. One of my websites is getting most of the traffic from web designers and people, working on SEO. These groups are using Firefox web browser more often than Internet Explorer. For generic internet user this is not true. Similar offset in data could be expected from Compete.com. Though, it makes sense to include free version in your toolbox.

By the way, they are using quotas from Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Just curious, if Aaron is involved in this project.